A child is born. Before they even landed “Earthside”, in the language of Instagram, a scan of them as a foetus in utero was uploaded to a waiting audience. The room in which they will sleep – the pale pastel paintwork, the carefully curated nursery furniture – is all there, ready, waiting: an advertorial empty of its model. Then comes the photo of the baby being born, held aloft to their audience while still covered in vernix, eyes not yet open, their mother smiling, hair perfect.
From now on, their every moment and milestone is documented for the camera and monetised. That first smile, first word, first step, all mediated by a device and sent to an audience of strangers, many of whom have formed a parasocial relationship with that mother, that father, that child. The child comes to know and understand the black mirror that is regularly put in front of them. There will be days when the child happily performs for the camera; others when they push it away, when they don’t want to be filmed. A natural feeling, but one they may well have learned to suppress. Because performing for the camera makes mummy and daddy happy, although they don’t call it performing. They call it authenticity.
One day, after years and years of this, that child rebels.
That child isn’t Brooklyn Beckham, who was born before the advent of Instagram, so started his life being monetised in print instead. But they may as well be. To paraphrase one Mumsnet user, the Beckham family feud could spark a #MeToo moment for the children of celebrities and influencers. The Beckhams walked so that influencers could run – they’ve learned from the best. So inured to this mass monetisation of childhood have large swathes of the public become that many no longer see anything wrong with it. They no longer see the truth, which is that we are in the midst of a giant social experiment, with children as the guinea pigs. Never before in the history of humanity have children seen their right to privacy so violated, and by the adults who are supposed to care for and protect them. And anyone who watches or engages with this kind of mass content is complicit.
Call me pious, or jealous, or a luddite if you like, but I know I am not the only one to whom this all just feels so, so wrong. Yesterday I watched a reel of a newborn baby who had been outside their mother’s body for a mere 20 minutes before their face was beamed around the world, and I thought – excuse my language – “this is fucked”. I felt grubby in my spectatorship, mere days after Brooklyn’s public denunciation of his family system, and the psychological damage that he claims public exposure has caused him. I don’t follow these people, but they still, somehow, appear.
Children of 1990s and 2000s celebrity culture – Prince Harry being another – are the canaries in the coalmine of this mass experiment. Those damaged boys – now men – have tried to tell us in their own words how difficult it is to construct your own identity when you grow up in the glare of spectacle. For this they are called ungrateful, because in this economy, isn’t fame and fortune the best thing a parent can give a child?
Only if you’ve lost touch with what a child needs – food, water, love, attention, interaction, a feeling of safety – can you think this life is preferable to a normal, private childhood. “Brand partnerships” do not appear on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for a reason. Brand partnerships don’t give a child the freedom they need to be themselves without self-scrutiny, an essential freedom for psychological wellbeing in adulthood. Nor does being constantly photographed and shared.
The problem is that so much of it just seems so wholesome. Smiling children in matching pyjamas, blowing out birthday candles, paddling at the beach, dancing. Sometimes, their tears and their tantrums are shared, too (I have written about that cruelty before): all the better to share these moments of vulnerability. So authentic. Teachable, even.
There are of course the shocking cases of neglect and abuse, such as that of the YouTube vlogger Ruby Franke. The vast majority of content creators are not like this. However, uncomfortable though it is to state, any influencer who centres their children in their content operates on the same continuum, and some people – myself included – judge them for it. Not that they, with their hundreds of thousands of followers, probably care about that.
When they might start to care, though, is when their own children inevitably speak out. I believe that these parents are heading for a painful reckoning. So, albeit to a lesser extent, are the people consuming it, who have somehow found themselves able to detach from the reality of what they are doing, which is looking at other people’s children on the internet. After all, the children seem happy enough, don’t they?
As far as I’m concerned, it’s all very creepy and wrong. It amounts to a deprivation of a child’s freedom to enjoy their childhood unobserved. And look, I’m not perfect: I have written about my child, shared photos of the back of his head. Perhaps your kid’s face is on the internet. Maybe you feel uneasy about that, and about the accounts that you follow. All I ask is that you examine that feeling, listen to it. Maybe consider pressing unfollow, locking your account. This isn’t going away. Brooklyn is only the beginning.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
